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Political Studies Professor Omar G. Encarnación on Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and the Resiliency of Right-Wing Populism During the Coronavirus Pandemic

“Around the world, right-wing populist leaders are exploiting the pandemic for their own political benefits . . . In Bolsonaro’s case, the pandemic is providing him with a golden opportunity to remind the public of one of the things that got him elected in the first place: his law-and-order background (he was a parachutist in the Brazilian Army) and affection for the military,” writes Encarnación in Foreign Policy.

Political Studies Professor Omar G. Encarnación on Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and the Resiliency of Right-Wing Populism During the Coronavirus Pandemic

“Around the world, right-wing populist leaders are exploiting the pandemic for their own political benefits . . . In Bolsonaro’s case, the pandemic is providing him with a golden opportunity to remind the public of one of the things that got him elected in the first place: his law-and-order background (he was a parachutist in the Brazilian Army) and affection for the military,” writes Encarnación in Foreign Policy. “Since the crisis erupted, Bolsonaro has brazenly encouraged the militarization of the government by, among other things, expanding the powers of the generals in his administration beyond the confines of military affairs and by amplifying calls for a military takeover at rallies where he has been in attendance.”

Kevin Barbosa has won a Fulbright Award to Mexico City. The Class of 2018 alumnus was a member of the men’s swim team and speaker of the student government at Bard. He has been selected for a Binational Business Internship, a unique program supported by Fulbright that allows grantees to live and work full time in Mexico City.

Kevin Barbosa ’18 Awarded Fulbright for Binational Business Program in Mexico City

Kevin Barbosa has won a Fulbright Award to Mexico City. The Class of 2018 alumnus was a member of the men’s swim team and speaker of the student government at Bard. He has been selected for a Binational Business Internship, a unique program supported by Fulbright that allows grantees to live and work full time in Mexico City. “I wanted to live in Latin America and use the knowledge I gained in banking and finance to help an organization that was specifically targeting economic issues common in Latin America, and the Binational Business Program in Mexico was the perfect solution,” Barbosa explains. The program is currently delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but Barbosa will be interviewing with a group of financial technology companies in the fall. He is also studying for his law school exams.

“Put simply, the blame-shifting from the Trump administration elides the fact that both China and the United States bear responsibility in creating the conditions that exist today,” says Professor Murray.

Bard College Director of Global Initiatives Michelle Murray on the US Response to China’s Role in Coronavirus Spread

“Put simply, the blame-shifting from the Trump administration elides the fact that both China and the United States bear responsibility in creating the conditions that exist today,” says Professor Murray. “An important effect of this rhetoric is that it positions China as a lesser, distinctly incapable global power relative to the superior United States, which in turn, precludes the kind of international cooperation that a pandemic requires.”

Opinion: Bard’s Ian Buruma on the Dangers of Using Virus as Metaphor

President Trump and some of his allies have made a point of calling the coronavirus a “Chinese virus,” the “Wuhan virus,” or, simply, a “foreign virus”—a type of rhetoric that taps into ancient and primitive fears, writes Professor Buruma. “A leader who applies chauvinism and prejudice to a frightening disease is not best equipped to deal with a pandemic. Nationalism should have no place in medical discourse. And medical language should never be applied to politics. Coronavirus isn’t Chinese or foreign; it is global. Blaming alien forces, whether in the name of God, or science or simple prejudice, is bound to make things a great deal worse.”

“If anything at all has been learned from nine years of geopolitical and humanitarian catastrophe in Syria it is this: In dealing with adversaries devoid of human values and basking in impunity, diplomacy unbacked by the credible threat of military force is not really diplomacy; rather it is a useless exercise in wordsmithing, one shuttling between naivete and cynicism. It is pseudo diplomacy. Current events in northwestern Syria”—a ceasefire agreement between Turkey and Russia that allows the Assad regime to keep the territory it has gained through Russian-abetted state terror—“drive home the point,” says Hof.

Like former UN Ambassador Samantha Power, Susan Rice—national security adviser under Barack Obama and author of the new memoir Tough Love—expresses deep personal sorrow for what has happened to Syrians since March 2011. “But, like Power,” Hof observes, “Rice wraps her regrets in a narrative aimed at selling the proposition that there was, in the end, really nothing her boss could do to protect Syrian civilians from mass homicide; nothing short of involving the United States in another Iraq-like invasion and occupation and perhaps even World War III. The proposition is no truer coming from Rice’s pen than it was from Obama’s lips.”

Bard Historian Walter Russell Mead On the Future of Working-Class Conservatism in the UK and US

Since the British Labour Party’s shattering defeat in last week’s general election, many people have been thinking through its implications for the left, and especially for the Democrats’ prospects in 2020. But what did the result mean for the right? Walter Russell Mead, James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College, weighs in.

Lia Russell ’17 on Fighting Bias in AI-Powered Decisions

Artificial intelligence and automation can streamline or eliminate manual labor, but public- and private-sector organizations still need managers to monitor and make corrections when algorithms exhibit biases, writes Russell.

New Book Coauthored by Ethan Porter ’07 Shows Facts Have Little Effect on How We Vote

In their new book False Alarm: The Truth about Political Mistruths in the Trump Era, Ethan Porter ’07 and Thomas J. Wood find that if you correct untruths you can make people’s opinion of the facts substantially more accurate; you can also correct outright fake news. “That, however, is the end of the good news,” writes columnist Daniel Finkelstein in the London Times. “Porter and Wood provide a depressing reason why factual correction is possible: it is that facts just aren’t that important to people in forming their political views. So people can accept a correction of a fact that supports their candidate or partisan view without feeling fundamentally challenged. Their basic position and affiliation doesn’t crumble when a mere fact is corrected, so they are content to accept the correction. As the authors put it: ‘People do not care enough about facts to engage in motivated reasoning against them.’”

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Thursday, March 5, 2020

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Anna Rosmus, an author and researcher whose high school essay exposed the Nazi past of her home town, will speak about her research and experiences, the importance of historical truth, and the challenges of being labeled a traitor, following the showing of The Nasty Girl, a film based on Anna’s life. Cosponsored by Center for Civic Engagement, German Studies, Hannah Arendt Center, Historical Studies, Political Studies.

Friday, February 21, 2020

Neil Roberts; Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Political Theory, and the Philosophy of Religion at Williams CollegeReem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 His talk features pieces of his latest book project that examines what it means to live free, the challenges of genres of pessimism, and finally provides a way forward for the pessimistic. Neil Roberts received a B.A. in Afro-American Studies and Law & Public Policy from Brown University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago with a specialization in political theory. A high school teacher, debate coach, and NCAA Division 1 soccer player prior to graduate school, Roberts is the recipient of fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation as well as a member of the Caribbean Philosophical Association Board of Directors.

His present writings deal with the intersections of Caribbean, Continental, and North American political theory with respect to theorizing the concepts of freedom and agency. Roberts is co-editor of both the CAS Working Papers in Africana Studies Series (with Ben Vinson) and a collection of essays (with Jane Anna Gordon) on the theme Creolizing Rousseau (2015), and he is the guest editor of a Theory & Event symposium on the Trayvon Martin case. In addition to being on the Executive Editorial Board of the journal Political Theory and former Chair of CPA Publishing Partnerships that includes The C.L.R. James Journal and books with Rowman and Littlefield International, he is author of the award-winning book Freedom as Marronage (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and the collaborative work Journeys in Caribbean Thought (2016). His most recent book is A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass (2018) from The University Press of Kentucky. Roberts served as President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association from 2016 to December 2019. Since July 2018, he has been the W. Ford Schumann Faculty Fellow in Democratic Studies.